Zyrusticae

See, the problem there is that you just don't like the core gameplay loop. Which... a new class isn't going to fix, because you'd need the gameplay to fundamentally change to fix that. (Either that, or you need to actually play the harder instances where there's always something to keep track of besides your rotation. I know the game's combat starts off dreadfully boring but it picks up a LOT at the "endgame".)

Yes. Yes, I do. I can't not point these things out. It's a compulsion.

Well, in all honesty, I have limited sympathy for someone who is only interested in an entire game for one specific class to the exclusion of all others. That speaks to a sort of narrowmindedness that does not sound particularly healthy. Surely anyone can find at least one other class they like that's currently in the game? It's not like we have MASSIVE HOLES in the current lineup or anything. That's an oxymoron. I think the word you're looking for is 'tiny'.

I wish I could go topless. Instead, the closest I can get is wearing a bikini top. Bloody double standards. Grrr, grrr, rar, etc. Admittedly, I wouldn't really want to unless they gave us the muscle slider we so deserve. Gotta show off dem muscles, ya know? But only Hyur and Roes get that privilege. YES I JELLY! Grrr. Hiss.

Unfortunately, we're very unlikely to see much in the way of long capes and cloaks simply because the clipping is outrageous unless they use really expensive cloth physics or use some bizarre weighting to tie it to character movement (which always looks cheap IMO). A bit unfortunate that even in 2015 we still have.. literally no games with really credible clothing physics, but them's the technological breaks.

Of course it wasn't everyone's first thought. We're not a hive mind. But, I mean... an outfit that bares legs, midriff, and shoulders is always going to get comments to that effect. And the artist's intent is actually largely irrelevant to this (though, again, I would argue that the intent is really bloody obvious). None of the other new outfits present the character as sexually available the way that one does. This should be a surprise to no one. If anything, you should be glad that this is the first instance on the site where someone pointed out that (really obvious) association. I was certainly thinking it when I saw it. I just knew better than to point it out, lest this exact conversation begin to play out. Really, I just find the objections to the comment to be quite silly at this point. If I put on the coliseum galerus I know exactly what kinds of comments I'll be getting. I'm not going to get in a huff and be offended by it. I'll accept what I get and move on. It's only when people are outright disrespectful that there is an issue, and quite frankly, what seems to be more the problem here to me is simply a lack of respect for what the courtesan profession stands for. If it weren't for the objections to that little comment my thoughts would simply begin and end with "yeah, I bet it will be" and nothing more. Now I'm just wondering how many people wear bikinis ICly outside of Costa Del Sol and are mystified by the propositions they receive. Now that's a curious thought...

I'm not sure why the negative reaction to that, however. Because the insinuation seems to be courtesans and ERPers will be the ones the set will appeal to. While that might be partly true some of us just want it because it looks nice. It's kind of offensive to think anyone who wants it is just out to get laid. Maybe that wasn't your intent but that was how it came across to me. You're reading too much into it. The first thing that came to mind was courtesans. And if the OP thought that first thing, they're not going to be alone, for very obvious reasons. That's not insinuating that ONLY courtesan RPers are the ones interested in that outfit, just that it is the strongest association people will make with those kinds of outfits. Unfortunately, this is not something you can control. It's the result of repeated reinforcement from all kinds of media using that attire for that particular kind of appeal (and the design itself, frankly, being really obvious in its design intent in the first place). You really shouldn't be bothered by this. Neither courtesans nor ERPers nor anyone associated should be considered 'lesser beings' or looked down upon, so this should not be an offensive inference to make. Furthermore, you should have enough self-awareness to know how you're coming across given how you dress your character (or, ICly, how they dress themselves), unless, of course, a lack of self-awareness is a part of the character. You can be annoyed that people aren't making the associations you think they should be making, but you have about as much control over that as you do anyone else's thought patterns. The most you can do is correct people when they make incorrect assumptions based on your state of dress. And if you're wearing an outfit with that strong an association with that particular trade, you're going to be doing a lot of correcting, sorry to say.

All this talk about age kind of makes me miss RPing in Aion. Just because age becomes a complete abstraction that is entirely separate from your character's appearance, so you can assume absolutely nothing based on looks. That old geezer could end up being "younger" than that spry-looking teenager over there. And then when you talk about age, and you have people whose ages are measured in centuries, how do you even handle that in conversation? How that question is answered says a LOT about a character on its own. Some folks take to immortality quite well, while others find it to be more of a prison sentence without an end. And so on and so forth. But this is all irrelevant here, because I am 100% certain that every race in Eorzea generally does not live very long, especially given how violent the place can actually be at times. I will be the face of un-surprise when, one lore panel later, Au Ra are confirmed as living just about as long as every other being in Eorzea... i.e. not very long at all. And I will reserve the right to roll my eyes at anyone who attempts to claim immortality in a setting where such a thing automatically marks you as some kind of awful, horrible abuser of black and evil magicks. And then stab them in the face to test their immortality. Hohohohoho. (No, not really. I'll probably just have T'rahnu assume them to be a loony, like she does so many others.)

All this ranting about the MSQ makes me appreciate how good Blade & Soul's story is in comparison. Which is a bit mean of me to say because I know most folks won't actually get to touch it until its release later (much later) this year. Anyway. Yes, there's a lot of stuff they could have handled better during the MSQ. A lot of their plot threads were way too obvious going forward, which, while not a problem in and of itself, only makes some of the jankier bits stand out that much more. And then there's the whole question of ascribing motives to the PC that the player almost certainly doesn't share, which can feel a bit problematic in an MMORPG where the PC is completely unique to that player. Buuuut the game's story is more of an incidental thing - for me at least, it's just a fun little sideshow and not really something I take all that seriously. If it were more like an old-school Western RPG where we could pick dialogue options and affect the course of the story in some significant ways, I would actually have more reasons to care. Instead, I just take what fun lore I can get from it and otherwise largely discard it. Oh, and occasionally I revisit the cutscenes so I can take pretty pictures. But, y'know, that has nothing to do with the story and a lot more to do with the cinematography and the graphics and the artwork and that sort of thing, so... Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Anything in the style of the Souls games' plate armor. I cannot lie. This sort of stuff makes or breaks a class for me. Without good armor options, I just can't give a toss. Also, as a more 'pipe dream' type of request, I really want an open longcoat to wear as a machinist, and for it NOT to be gender-locked for guys. Something like Black Rock Shooter's would be nice, though obviously it'd have to be something more appropriate for Eorzea.

I'm going to be a butt and say I don't like any of the XIV dungeons. Why? Well, because I've played each and every single one of them many dozens of times and am now utterly sick of them. Sick of them. Once the novelty has worn off the only thing I care about is getting my daily tomestones and GTFO of there. I couldn't even bring myself to login for the longest time just because I didn't have any motivation to run them one more gods-damned time. B&S has spoiled me in this regard, mostly because the core gameplay loop is strong enough to compensate for running the same thing for the thirty-fourth time. Not so much for FFXIV. Maybe the level 60 skills will change my attitude in this regard. Probably not, because you'll only get to use those skills... in Heavensward dungeons! Yaaaay. (Groan.) Anyway. In all seriousness, I do still KINDA like Wanderer's Palace HM, mostly because SAVE THE TONBERRIES and the stellar music. Also love WoD mostly for its music as well, and the boss fights are actually kind of entertaining. Getting eaten by Cerberus remains a... treat, heh.

I missed this, and.. but.. no, I really won't know what to think of it until I see it and how prevalent it is. There's still this whole.. sea of clouds thing that I can't quite wrap my head around either... Anyway, there's no chance that Aya herself will fly. Except by airship! Yep, this is pretty much my feelings exactly. Aether-powered flight is all well and good, but those tiny stubby little wings flapping so hard... or worse, the GIGANTIC fat 'bos with those tiny wings? It looks dumb, it feels wrong, and I just can't accept that. I'll probably have T'rahnu act nonplussed about them (as she is about many strange things in Eorzea), but OOCly I will always see them as an eyesore and hope and pray that most players use more credible mounts for flight instead. Personal airships are fine. I like those. At least they look cool. Flightless birds suddenly taking flight? Worse yet, gigantic fat ones? No. No, thanks.

130 -> 170? Themepark itemization is silly. Edit: The plate armor looks great. On the other hand, I am NOT enamored with their sudden fascination with skirts. BRD with a long skirt looks particularly silly for a class that jumps around so much. On the flipside, I like that machinist's gun. Looks like I'll have quite a stable of glamours for muh pow-pow. Edit #2: Okay, wow. The environments look REALLY good. DX11 probably helps a lot with that.

GW2's entire world and game design is completely different from ARR's. There's no point trying to use that as an example when the two games share almost no mechanics to speak of. The class mechanics alone make it impossible for them to change things that drastically. Unless they completely retooled the way attributes work in the game, there would be no reason to pick anything other than the most optimal stat mixes as players already do now. And that would be one seriously major undertaking, to say the least. And if you've never seen balance issues with horizontal gear, I can only assume you never played FFXI, which is where those issues were really noticeable and a large part of why FFXIV is itemized the way it is. GW2's form of horizontal gear is mostly meaningless anyway. Once you have your optimal stat mix you have zero incentive to get another set. A huge part of what people want from horizontal gear is for each piece to have more meaning than simple ilvls. GW2 does NOT accomplish this. In that regard, its gear system is a failure. GW2's style is to have permanent story developments that completely and irreversibly change sections of the game world. ARE YOU SURE THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT? There is no way to replay sections of the story that you missed out on. This is one of my biggest complaints about the way GW2 does things. I mean, they could have Ishgard permanently open their doors to everyone after a mass story event... that no one could ever replay or experience again because it was a one-time deal. I'm pretty sure the amount of bitching that would occur would be just as astronomical as what did happen to Arenanet when they did the same thing. No, even greater, because at least in GW2's case a fair chunk of the playerbase doesn't give a toss about its story whereas Final Fantasy is a completely different matter. That being said, they could at least give us access to classes without having to play through main story content and going through the ilvl grind... but apparently they decided against that. I don't know the thought process behind why they made that decision, but I can only assume they thought long and hard about it before making it. Or at least, I would hope as much. I do agree that being able to skip all the unlocking with alts would be a great change, however. That's one thing that FFXIV does really, really poorly.

The reasoning is extremely obvious: they want a carrot on a stick for maxed-out players to chase over and over again. Horizontal gear drops does not accomplish this because the motivation to gun for that gear simply is not strong enough (not to mention it can introduce serious balance issues that result in certain pieces of gear being used for years without replacement). This is besides the fact that the game was not designed for that sort of thing to begin with, so adding it down the road would only introduce massive complications as they try to work things out. I do understand the game's story shouldn't take so much priority in your view, but obviously Yoshida disagrees, and he is treating the game much like a single-player RPG in that regard - he wants to able to have some serious story developments occur, and having people be able to skip around is quite problematic for that kind of storytelling. Unfortunately, if this does not sit right with you, it's just something you'll have to deal with. That's less of a concern than how many new players will there be at those levels? Most of the gating content is group-based. People are already having a tough time to do MSQ dungeons if they're a certain class while leveling. Not because they're difficult but because nobody queues for low-level unless they absolutely need to. Couple that with the typical lack of tanks/healers in MMOs, there's the recipe for a full blown disaster. Around as bad as the original Tri-Disaster. They only need to properly incentivize the low-level roulette. As it is, it's just not rewarding enough for the time you have to put in. Give it enough of an incentive and people WILL run it.

"You heard about Mistbeard's treasure, yeah? Well, I heard tell there's some guide that's willin' to brave the mists to lead us there. Catch is, no one's e'er returned with aught in hand..."

All these additional DPS abilities is making me kind of scared. There's already a huge, enormous outsized difference between players who know how to play their classes and players who don't. The additional abilities are only going to increase the divide. They really need some kind of proper tutorial for each class, because way too many players are going to get carried to cap without knowing how to play properly.

So Bards now get the exact same charge mechanic that Machinists get. Hmmmm. Or maybe not exactly the same, but pretty similar. Have yet to see Machinist's side so....

The music... I need that music. The Last Vigil, they say... I will pay this place a visit just to listen.

Wow, the actual Heavensward theme is NOT the operatic vocal we heard in the trailer. Another Susan Calloway track. Nifty.

Always amused by these. I wish we could pick so many hair options in the actual game. Mixing and matching different parts... yeah, that'd be nice. This particular char-maker needs some jaw and chin options pretty badly, tho. I can understand why they're not there since it'd require every option that shows up on the chin to be redone for the variations, but at least one square-jaw option would be nice for the guys... hmm.

Evidently, there are also individuals who feel it is impossible to simply show basic respect to other posters as human beings when any level of disagreement is reached, which I find to be a very odd position to take. Yes, some people might take offense easily and may consider even simple disagreements to be such, but those disagreements are not actionable. Only if it is clear from the perspective of multiple people can you be actioned for making a post that is clearly and obviously inflammatory (and remember, warnings and even bans can be appealed). There is a visible distinction between a simple disagreement and a post that is designed in such a way as to belittle the viewpoint or the viewpoint's holder, often in a crass fashion. Unless one of the mods goes off the rails, there will never be a point where you get warned just for disagreeing with someone. Never. We have a problem on the RPC, and it does no one any favors to somehow pretend that being hands-off is the direction to take when that so clearly has not worked for it thus far. If you have a specific example of a moderator action that is questionable, clearly, as this thread has shown, you can take it up with the mods and have them reconsider the action and possibly the rule being enforced. Until that happens, speaking in such vagaries as "what if someone gets offended?!" doesn't help anything and only serves to paint your intentions in a suspicious light.

As someone who occasionally goes completely off the rails at times, I just wanted to post about my experience here. It seems to me like half the time any problems come up because one or both 'sides' in a conversation decide they no longer need to show any due reverence or respect for the other participants or their conflicting views, and phrase their language in such a fashion that makes that extremely obvious. It's one of those things that you can kind of become blind to because you've been engaging in it for so long that you no longer realize when you're doing it. I'm... not even sure how often I've done this, and honestly, I'm afraid to go back and check. It's a rather fine-grained distinction to make, and I know some folks frown on the idea of 'tone-policing', but it is simply a part of our reality that we must accept - that people are emotional beings and can and will be prone to acting out emotionally given the proper stimulus to do so. As such, it only makes sense to be very careful in how we articulate ourselves in order to prevent that emotional side from overtaking everything. However, in some cases this may not actually be possible, because the subject itself is an emotionally charged one full of people with passionate stakes in the matter. I know exactly what those issues are for me, and I will not hesitate to admit that I should probably refrain from all topics discussing them, simply because I will not be able to behave in a rational manner. At the same time, I also think it's important for people to understand and be able to recognize when those lines have been crossed. If you see someone acting out about a topic they really believe strongly in, it's important to trust that those feelings are genuine and come from the heart, rather than blowing them off and treating them as non-entities, which ALWAYS exacerbates matters and only makes things worse. One of the most frustrating things I've dealt with is the one time someone decided to call out my behavior as 'emotional manipulation' (note - I am not interested in discussing that individual here, I am only focusing on the specific behavior). It wasn't until long after the fact that I realized how incredibly disingenuous such an accusation actually is, especially as the only evidence supporting such a thing is the author's own hunch and not a long-term pattern of behavior. To put it short, I was effectively being called a liar, and there are very few ways you can call someone that without making the target look extremely bad and possibly inflaming the situation. If, on the other hand, the author assumed my behavior to be genuine (which it was) rather than fakery used specifically for emotional manipulation (which it wasn't), things could have gone on much more amiably than they did. Pointing out errors in logic is one thing - that's something I hope to see more of, if done with enough tact - but straight-up questioning the truthfulness of someone's admission of emotional weakness is... hilariously villainous, in hindsight. Those kinds of behaviors are the sort of thing I want to see a lot less of around these parts. Or around the Internet in general, really. It is possible to have friendly arguments without matters devolving into emotional and verbal abuse and constant bouts of passive-aggressiveness. The problem is keeping things from ever reaching that point in the first place, as often only a small, seemingly insignificant trigger is all that's needed to cross things over from one side to the other. I don't really have a solution for any of this, other than that we, in general, as posters, need to work on our collective conversational skills as well as being able to recognize when our emotional states do not allow for the kind of productive conversations one would hope to have on here. This is something I'm constantly working on, and honestly, how good I am seems to go up and down in long phases. A lot of it is just how much pressure I'm dealing with in my daily life, and I suspect that goes for a lot of posters on here as well. High stress is most definitely NOT conducive to any kind of conversation. Maybe all that's needed is for folks to go on a voluntary 'time-out' to go cool off sometimes. That's not a long-term solution, but it could help for the odd flare-up here and there. Heh, but that just sounds like life advice in general. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to just disappear and cool off in their given life circumstances, but, generally speaking, every one of us benefits from being able to just sit back and relax every so often. If you can't get that time off, you may have bigger issues that need your attention than some stranger on the Internet saying things you don't like, you know? To put it short: be truthful, be genuine, assume others are doing the same, and DON'T be nasty even if you completely disagree, and that would solve like 99% of issues on here that I see. The only hard part is getting everyone to cooperate, which I admit is still most of the challenge. Sorry I can't be of more help on this point.

Miqo'te names are pretty straightforward, though not as straightforward as Lalafell names. It's really only the Elezen and Roegadyn names where you get the really strange and hard-to-pronounce stuff. For the record, T'rahnu Ihka is pronounced Tuh-ra-(short hiss)-nu Ee-(short hiss)-ka. No stresses on any of the syllables, just one smooth run from beginning to end. Of course, the hisses would be omitted for any non-Miqo'te speakers.